TRADITIONAL, NOT CONVENTIONAL.

Foodborne Illness (August 5, 2014)

It’s commonly called “food poisoning”, which is not a good term for it because it implies that toxins are responsible. This is not correct – usually a bout of food-borne illness is from bacterial or viral infection, and even when toxins are responsible for the illness their source is usually those same microbes. There are currently about 75 MILLION cases of foodborne illness in the U.S. per year and “in the U.S., diseases caused by the major pathogens alone are estimated to cost up to $35 billion annually in medical costs and lost productivity” (Wikipedia). That cost estimate is from 1997, and things have not improved -- I saw a recent estimate that one out of three Americans per year suffers from some kind of foodborne illness.

Most of the microbes responsible are zoonoses, meaning that they have come from animals. Since about a third of food poisoning cases are from consuming raw fruits and vegetables, how does this work? Well, it’s supposed to be from cross-contamination from meats and usually whoever is running the kitchen is blamed. I'm not completely buying this. I’d say that there are two obvious culprits – livestock farms that are disposing improperly of their animal waste, and biosolids. What are biosolids, you ask? Lucky you, if you didn’t know until now. They are RECYCLED SEWAGE, widely used in the U.S. as fertilizer. Says the EPA website:

“Biosolids are treated sewage sludge. Biosolids are carefully treated and monitored and must be used in accordance with regulatory requirements.”

I am not finding the use of the word "regulatory" here to be at all reassuring. Particularly in light of a recent, related news story. The FDA has just declared that even in face of considerable scientific evidence that widespread use of antibiotics in healthy livestock has promoted the emergence of increasingly dangerous strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria ("superbugs"), it flat-out refuses to ban this practice and instead is politely asking the livestock industry to voluntarily cease the practice. Since this use is done to promote rapid growth and minimize the loss of animals due to death and disease in the revoltingly unhealthy conditions most of them are raised in, any business that does this will be placed at a considerable competitive disadvantage. So I’m guessing there isn’t going to be much of a decrease in widespread animal antibiotic use any time soon.

Moreover there is ANOTHER recent story along those lines. The FDA will now be allowing any poultry plant that wants to, to do its own poultry inspections. The speed of the inspection lines will be capped at 140 carcasses per minute (what is that, about three chickens per second?) and factory employees will be permitted to do the inspections. Wow, no conflict of interest there.

So do not expect the government to inspect food properly, or even to mandate safe practices in industry. And do not think that food producers will “voluntarily” adopt rules that promote public health when those rules will cost them money. This is one area where we are genuinely on our own.

In light of all this, what kind of food safety procedures should we be following? What’s safe and unsafe? This little writeup is already a bit long, so I’ll take this up again next week [article "Safe Food"].